"This, then is our desert:
to live facing despair,
but not to consent.
To trample it down under hope in the Cross.
To wage war against despair unceasingly.
That war is our wilderness.
If we wage it courageously,
we will find Christ at our side.
If we cannot face it,
we will never find him."

Tuesday, 23 April 2013

Does the State determine our ethics and our morality?

For many of us, the crux of the 'gay marriage' debate has little to do with the rights of homosexuals, but concerns the much more interesting and significant philosophical (and theological) question of the legitimacy of the attempted imposition on its citizens of a State ideology of equality, something which will be taught to children in government- funded (i.e. taxpayer- funded) state schools, regardless of parental wishes or religious tradition. It's curious how secular thought in the 'democratic' West has come to demand similar control over the minds and actions of children as did the totalitarian regimes of left and right of the last century.Read this article: it's very instructive:

...the [French] Minister of Education, Vincent Peillon, has specified that “the goal of the secular morality is to remove all family, ethnic, social and intellectual determinisms from the pupil” to “allow each pupil to be liberated,” because “the goal of the Republican education system has always been to produce a free individual”. In the same way, the Minister of Justice, Christiane Taubira has declared to the Assembly that “in our values, education aims to relieve pupils of social and religious determinisms and make them free citizens”....

'free,' that is to think and do what the State considers appropriate...To be nostalgic for a moment, if only there were (as someone reportedly once said) 'no such thing as society,' individuals and families would be free to follow the voice of conscience untrammelled by the diktats of a state-sponsored post-modernism which, while denying the very concept of truth, paradoxically and risibly tries to impose its own version of it.